Tag: magazine

In 1926, a long-form print ad for the U.S. School of Music was written by John Caples, and the headline read, “They Laughed When I Sat Down At the Piano, But When I Started to Play!” It’s been noted as one of the most perfect headlines ever written.

More multiplatform publishers are seeing firsthand the value of subscription products and paywalls, which is why many new ones are launched. Today we’re looking at some of these paywall and subscription app launches, and the reasons these digital publishers are turning their attention to them.

So you want to know, how do online magazines generate revenue? The answer is clear: they go multiplatform.
If you’ve considered starting an online magazine, or are a legacy print magazine considering going digital, you’ve asked this question: How do online magazines generate revenue? And the answer is that the successful ones use a multiplatform approach.

ACEM doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but if you’ve been following along for awhile, you know this acronym is baked into everything we do here at Mequoda.

News from subscription website publishers are focusing on enhancements of subscription offerings and tools, with the intention of turning more casual audience members into paying supporters.

Creating an abundance of value within your subscription products is the key to subscription marketing and transforming your publishing business in the digital age
From time to time, it’s a good idea to sit down and think about the value proposition you provide prospective buyers in your subscription marketing efforts. When you are running a Six Sigma

Some of the most successful publishers let their users generate more than 99 percent of their content. The publishers that can do this become masters at building communities that draw users to both read and post.

Out of the nine subscription website business models, the community subscription website archetype is the only one where the publisher relies on its community to create the content. There are six premium (paid) archetypes, and three affinity (free) archetypes. This is one of the three free ones.

Publishers everywhere are seeing improved subscription revenue, and surely you want to see the same results. In order to put subscription revenue first, you should know the three reasons why we think this influx is happening:
First, we all should be thanking Amazon, Netflix and other large online businesses who have trained customers to think that

I woke up this morning thinking about all the great ways we’ve discovered to sell subscriptions on the Internet. Yes, these are the things that I dream about. The idea that while I’m deeply asleep, the systems we manage are busily selling subscriptions to magazines and newsletters and premium memberships that include all sorts of benefits to customers who are awake and spending money while I’m sound asleep makes me a happy guy.

Great content can be hard to find. That’s why Google is using its search engine and video platform to target high-quality content from a variety of digital publications. Today we’re looking at news of Google’s most-recent moves to attract publisher content, and we look at the benefits that licensing has had for digital publishers.

Magazines are designed to be read from front to back. They have covers and a table of contents. Magazines are arranged in a series of articles. Portals are not meant to be read from front to back, and are in no way linear. Users may begin on an article they found through search and hyperlink their way across the site in a matter of seconds. There is no true table of contents, although there is arrangement in the form of categories, topic pages and related articles.

So what is a digital magazine? It’s a bit of a hybrid.

ACEM doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but if you’ve been following along for awhile, you know this acronym is baked into everything we do here at Mequoda.

How lucky are we, as publishers, to live in the age of content marketing and search engines. While other marketers struggle to become adept at content creation, it’s already in our DNA.

Just add search engine optimization skills, great website architecture and a genuinely content-driven email publishing program, and publishers can literally make millions on the Internet.

If you’re an experienced direct response copywriter, you know that “you” is generally considered to be the most powerful single word, ranking right up there with free, new and save.

As direct marketing legend Herschell Gordon Lewis says in The Art of Writing Copy, “Unless the reader regards himself as the target of your message, benefit can’t exist. Benefit demands a ‘We/You’ relationship.”

Every experience you’ve ever had building and rebuilding a magazine website typically begins with you explaining what you want, and then you telling a group of developers and designers what to do and what to fix. But when did you become an expert in digital publishing strategy and website architecture?

Three media platforms are generating increased revenue and profits for these three publishers
If you’re looking for new ways to increase online revenues and profits, consider learning from three publishers who we consider to be doing a great job building their multiplatform media empires, The American Ceramic Society, Countryside, and Country Living. Using these three ancillary

Back in 2006 I read an article comparing the fidelity and convenience of watching a movie on an iPod, a home theater, or in a state-of-the-art movie theater. The author cleverly pointed out that the three media platforms offer the viewer an inverted user experience on the dimensions of fidelity and convenience.

In other words, the users will experience high convenience and low fidelity on the iPod, or what now would be an iPad; moderate convenience and moderate fidelity with the home theater; and low convenience and high fidelity at the cinema. And for some people, it’s just about preference.

ACEM doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but if you’ve been following along for awhile, you know this acronym is baked into everything we do here at Mequoda.

As a magazine publisher, you understand that every completed issue is the result of effective communication between staff members. The success of one department directly influences and depends on the success of another. When you become a multiplatform publisher, the same principles apply, particularly when it comes to the various tech providers who run your digital publishing platforms. But managing these separate vendors is time consuming, ineffective, and expensive.

I’ll keep this to the point, because I know you’re busy. Registration for the upcoming Mequoda Subscription Marketing & Publishing Intensive on May 17-18 in Boston closes in one week. 
This year’s Intensive is newly updated to focus on subscription and membership revenue. The event will highlight our tested and proven strategies for increasing audience, revenue and profits. Here

In the words of David Ogilvy, “a good advertisement is one that sells the product without drawing attention to itself.” And when selling a web magazine, one of the best ways to do so, is by giving away enough content that it basically sells itself, but not so much that visitors don’t convert into subscribers.

Subscription website publishers are honing their subscription offerings to generate greater revenue and utilize the subscriber data file that they already have. This process is not new, but some of the directions that major publishers are taking is new for these organizations, and the focus of today’s news stories.

Did you know that a sunflower is not just one flower, but more than a thousand small flowers, all stuck together on one head and a single stalk? Even what seems like the petals of a sunflower are considered individual ray flowers.

You might consider a publisher’s website the same way. You see TIME.com and think, oh that’s TIME’s website. But in fact, it’s a subscription marketing system. The site isn’t built just to give away free content, it’s built to collect new subscribers and generate revenue. Its web magazine alone, time.com/magazine, is just one petal of the sunflower that is attracting and converting new magazine subscribers, both free (email) and paid (digital and print).

One thing we’ve noticed about the most successful publishers we know is that they have three major things in common. And it has nothing to do with being a household name, a ton of charisma or a rampant following on social media.

How these innovative publishers built web magazine libraries that are comprehensive, user-friendly and make an easy up-sell from print.
A web magazine library is an archive of your content going back many years, likely since the beginning. When done right, you can upsell a substantial number of would-be magazine subscribers to this higher-end, and higher priced product that requires

Digital publishers are constantly working to find the best methods and channels for creating and distributing their content. Today we are looking at some of the strategies these publishers are using to get more engagement and bigger audiences.

As you know, having an online portal for your information is essential for growth. Using the web to publish and distribute content and not just serve as an extension of your brand is critical. But this is a new beast, and to be prepared, you must plan. This holds true even if your business has survived the last 50 to 100 years.

Mequoda is a term coined by Internet entrepreneur, website developer, and company founder Don Nicholas, to describe a method for designing and managing successful websites and website networks. Short for “media quote daily,” Mequoda is an approach to building website networks, based on four core principles—ACEM in Mequoda-talk.

The essential core characteristics of a magazine are those that define the user experience.

In this week’s strategy spotlight with Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda, explains how the attributes that define a magazine are not necessarily better or worse than those that define other media — movies, books, etc. They are simply different in terms of the user experience.

How the top magazine publishers in social media are leveraging three major platforms for magazine social marketing
According to the MPA’s Magazine Media Factbook, 91% of U.S. adults read magazine media, but where do they read it? Right now we’re working on our 2018 Digital Magazine Reader Survey, and social media is the second most used

New and evolved technologies can be an audience development manager’s dream if it leads to bigger audiences.

Where are your audience development strengths and weaknesses? Today’s news focuses on pertinent information for audience development managers, including actions that some major publishers are taking now.

The true audience development definition requires maximum outreach while retaining results for future sales

Just like “inbound marketing” was the buzzword of the online marketing industry last year, “audience development” begins to grow in popularity. HubSpot coined the term “inbound marketing”, which basically means bringing customers to you.

Last week we asked what is audience development? Just like “inbound marketing” has been a buzzword over the past few years, “audience development” begins to grow in popularity.

HubSpot coined the term “inbound marketing,” which basically means bringing customers to you that are already in your niche, rather than sending out direct mail and going to trade shows, of which the methods are expensive and have a lower return on your investment.

What changes in multiplatform publishing will lead to the biggest future successes? We’re seeing more actions from publishers with both short-term and long-term goals in mind.

A publisher’s minimum information unit (MIU) is the bedrock on which the best subscription business models are built. Any online publisher who doesn’t bother to understand and identify their MIU will fumble trying to build a successful subscription website.

In this week’s Freebie Friday spotlight, Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda, explains why using monthly pricing to accommodate a user’s desire to sample, is just one key to selling more subscriptions. From there you can download How to Use Contrast Pricing to Increase Subscription Revenue to learn more about pricing your print and digital magazine subscriptions.

Today is the last day you can save on your seat to this unique and powerful subscription marketing and publishing event 
If you have been thinking about registering for our Subscription Marketing & Publishing Intensive this May, today is the last day to save at least $300 on your seat. Don’t delay. It’s a great time to register  and pay

Coming up with the right subscription website business model(s) is usually the biggest stumbling block for those wanting to get into this business.

Choosing your content focus is a business-critical decision, as the focus you choose pretty much dictates your chances of success with a subscription website. However, more serious than the focus on content for

While the challenge of choosing the right subscription and single copy pricing strategy is not new to magazine publishers, it’s virgin territory for most subscription website publishers and many publishers exploring the digital newsstand landscape.

Even magazine publishers are faced with new economic realities.

The marginal cost of delivering a digital subscription to your own website is near zero. The cost of delivering digital issues via the Apple, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble digital newsstands is based on remit and the cost of delivering a digital issue paid to your digital publishing software provider (Mag+, Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, etc.).

If your goal is to generate advertising and sponsorship revenue from a free newsletter or advisory service with a robust subscription and advertising website, the Mequoda Haven CXMS can do it, and has done it for many other publishers like you.

Magazines are designed to be read from front to back. They have covers and a table of contents. Magazines are arranged in a series of articles. Compare that with other media, where the articles are arranged with taxonomies and hyperlinks, and are not linear.

Hyperlinking is not linear. Any medium that enables or encourages the reader to bounce around among hundreds or thousands of articles is not a linear medium. What’s more, humans desire closure, which magazines provide. A reader can say “I have read the April issue of Vanity Fair. I finished it on Sunday.”

Digital publishing has evolved to new heights with the help of partnerships and acquisitions that lead to new offerings, opportunities, and audience exposure.

It’s amazing to look back to just a year or so ago, when digital magazines were still something of a novelty. Today, it’s a given that print publishers will soon create a digital version of their product if they haven’t already.

If you think that your website should be the main driver of your revenue, think again. Email subscribers are responsible for between 60 and 80% of all digital revenue generation, while passing website visitors and social followers make up the balance.

Over and over again, we’ve found that passing website visitors don’t turn into buyers. They simply remain …

“You live and die by your ability to prioritize. You must focus on the most important, mission-critical tasks each day and night, and then share, delegate, delay or skip the rest.” Those are the wise words of Jessica Jackley, co-founder of the successful micro-loan startup, Kiva. And Eli Broad, 185th wealthiest person in the world, and the only person we know of who has built two Fortune 500 companies in two different industries confirms prioritizing and delegating simply isn’t done enough. “The inability to delegate is one of the biggest problems I see with managers at all levels,” says Broad.

Today we’re looking at three multiplatform publishers that have taken to the strategy of recycling and repurposing content to build larger audiences.

How would you like to expand your product line with something that’s based on content you already have, increases your credibility in your niche, offers your customers immediate gratification, and will sell in the thousands, maybe tens of thousands … or even millions?

When most people think of digital magazines, they narrow their focus on digital magazine apps that can be found in a digital newsstand or app store, but data shows that apps aren’t where users want to digest premium magazine content.

Do you think offering your readers a 24/7 online encyclopedia of information is a product they might subscribe to? Would they be willing to pay more for a print subscription if they could receive both for one price? The latter is usually the reason why publishers decide to create a digital archive of their back issues, and the revenue numbers we see from this upsell tells us it’s worth the investment.

If you’ve already decided to make a digital magazine library part of your online publishing strategy: that’s great. But before you move on, take a moment to finish this week’s strategy spotlight with Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda, who will elaborate on the most beneficial reasons for investing the capital to organize this not-so-small endeavor.

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A couple of years ago, Don outlined the attributes of a premium content subscription: not a website itself, but the thing that customers buy – the content subscription.

In updating this post (as we often do with our website content – a Mequoda best practice), we decided to give you an actual example of the perfect premium content subscription, and we settled on CooksIllustrated.com, the companion website to Cook’s Illustrated magazine from America’s Test Kitchen.

Deconstructing the phrase “premium content subscription” is a helpful exercise for getting this discussion onto the right track. Let’s take a look at each of the three words individually.

If your goal is to generate revenue and engagement for a business trade magazine or for paid subscriptions to a premium B2B newsletter or advisory service with a robust subscription website, the Mequoda Haven CXMS can do it, and has done it for many other publishers like you.